Since I have been in the US awaiting my residency visa for Chile, today I give you a note from the home field.

In the early days, they each brought notes they had collected while browsing at Barnes and Noble. Now, using Kindles or iPads, they check out their personalized recommendations on Amazon.com, noting in particular pages counts for each electronic edition of the book, as they balance a glass of wine in the other hand. These seven women, between the ages of 50 and 60 live in a town of 2,000 people nestled in Midwestern United States farming country. They are middle class women who teach elementary school, work as hospital administrators, or have recently retired from corporate insurance company jobs. All have grown children and though some are previously divorced, all are married now.

the book club women search Amazon reviews for their next reading in July 2013

These group meetings, though specifically organized around reading and discussion, always involve wine, politically charged discussions (one woman left the group after criticizing the others for being too liberal), and gossip. Even today, rather than finding out about life events on Facebook, I often find out about former high school classmates’ engagements or expected children through these women’s exchanges of information. And while these are great topics, the best gossip for them are younger men and women’s extramarital affairs. “We’re old and lead boring lives,” states Jane, with one son living nearby and the other several hours away. “We have to live vicariously through other people’s scandals.” Their favorite was when a neighbor of Katherine, a mother of two daughters who now live abroad, split with his young wife and moved in with the older and in their judgment, “trashier” woman across the street. They began referring to her as the “real housewife” of the town, referencing the popular Bravo channel reality television shows about wealthy women in cities around the United States. When the neighbor’s divorce was final and he moved with his new girlfriend to a nearby town, they were all disappointed that their first-row seat to the drama no longer existed.

Today, at a casual gathering for lunch, these same seven women drank coffee, ate quiche, and talked about Facebook. More accurately, one of the women described it as “bitching.” “I don’t care that your little Timmy lost his first tooth. I don’t need to see a picture of that!” said Katherine, an elementary school teacher. They complained about too many pictures of food, and status updates about cooking. “I mean, if they’re a famous chef fine. But I’m sorry, Mr. Smith from the pharmacy, I just really don’t care that you’re cooking sausage for dinner tonight” retorted Lucinda, whose two daughters, their husbands, and her three grandchildren both live in the suburbs of Chicago. She continued, “But that’s better than the ones who post really exciting things and just make you feel bad about yourself: Oh great, you went on vacation in Jamaica. Oh what a beautiful new pool you had put in. Oh, and your daughter graduated from law school. Give me a break!” “But we still look at it” shouted Lucinda’s sister Louise. “Why?” “Well,” chimed in Marlene—whose four children are spread from across town to across the country, “we have to keep tabs on them.” Then imitating mouse clicks she sneered, “What’s that bitch up to today/” Lucinda added, “Plus when I get Christmas letters in the mail I know which ones I just really don’t want to read. The ones with Caribbean vacations and kids with doctors just go straight in the garbage. I don’t need them making me feel bad about myself!”

It’s been a common finding among the fieldsites of the Global Social Media Impact Study, that parents primarily use Facebook to keep in touch with their children (you can find a number of examples on the blog). To an extent this is true among these women, many of whom have children and grandchildren far away. They post silly videos of grandkids, and comment on their daughters’ and sons’ photos and status messages. One who is something of a fictive aunt to me constantly chides my posting on Facebook in Spanish, because she can’t understand what I say. Though usually when she does the other women offer to show her the translate button that automatically appears. But as their conversation over lunch reveals, Facebook is also a venue for keeping tabs on the community. They learn the gossip they later discuss in person. As Henry Jenkins describes in the film Teenage Paparazzo, “When we gossip about someone, the person we're gossiping about is actually less important than the exchange that takes place between us. We’re using that other person—the celebrity, the town whore, or whatever—as a vehicle for us to share values with each other, to sort through central issues. In many ways, the women use information from facebook to police the boundaries of their in-group, as well as what is acceptable social behavior and what is not. Though they all do so good-naturedly, and would never want this information to be learned by those they criticize, this gossip and criticism form a major part of their friendship bonds with each other. As such, social networking, and Facebook in particular contribute to a major way that these women learn information about the community, to be discussed in person.

My article in Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology has finally been published. I'm very excited to share this with the world. It can be downloaded here from the journal, or alternatively here.

Mercedes takes on Comando in the ring in El Coloseo de Villa Victoria, La Paz, Bolivia

Of course, the development of this article may be traced through previous fieldnotes here on this blog, so I will take this opportunity to provide some of the most important links to my research on lucha libre in Bolivia:

this fieldnote has also been posted on the WHY WE POST blog hosted by University College London

toasting to new friends in Alto Hospicio

The first time I was invited out by friends on a Friday night in my fieldsite in Northern Chile, I was surprised by the ways social media and technology permeated the evening’s events. My new friend Alex* sent me a message on Facebook asking if I would like to go out with he and his friends Andrea and Edith, who I had never met. When he got to my street to pick me up, he sent another Facebook message to let me know. As I walked down the stairs and to the parking lot of my apartment building, I knew I was looking for a Honda because he was constantly posting pictures of it on Facebook. He was standing leaning against the car looking at his Samsung phone. When I got to the car, he began to tell me a story of locking his keys in the car while at Edith’s house. I already knew most of the story though, because someone had made fun of him for locking the keys inside via his Facebook wall about an hour earlier.

As the AAA (American Anthropological Association) annual conference descended upon Chicago a few weeks ago, the blogosphere and twittersphere (are those words?) were abuzz with everything even remotely anthropological. My favorite post of all, not surprisingly came from Savage Minds, and was titled “Conference Chic, or, How to Dress Like an Anthropologist.”

anthropologists buzzing around the hotel lobby at AAA

Now, this is not the first time I’ve scooped Savage Minds (the post in question)...But back in February 2012, I wrote a fieldnote titled “How to Dress like a Tattoo Artist.” Therein, I analyzed, discussed, and lightheartedly critiqued the ways my tattoo artist friends in La Paz dress. I concluded that “their bodies, in some ways more than other [people’s bodies], are obviously constructed…but though the specifics might differ, their bodies are constructed through the same processes as everyone else’s.”

These processes include, as outlined by Donald Lowe (2005), the work we do, the commodities we consume, and the politics of gender and sexuality [and I would add religion, race, class, etc, etc] to which we ascribe or aspire. In other words, these bodies (all bodies) flexibly accumulate markers through consumption, production and processes of identification. And though obviously much of this works through commodified symbols, most anthropologists are aware of, if not actively critiquing, the contradictions of the capitalist system and the social problems associated with consumptive practices of the late modern era. In short, many of us would not be caught dead in the middle of an anthro conference wearing something that everyone knows was made under unfair labor conditions, mass-marketed, cost more than a day’s salary, or looks too ‘mainstream.’

Thus, the non-commodified symbols carry perhaps more weight with anthropologists than with many other groups (though even with both tattoo artists and backpackers in South America, these are incredibly important). Savage minds lists six categories of anthropological fashion/fashion concern: “anthropological” fieldsite flair, professional-but-not-too-professional balance, critique of capitalism and consumerism, career-stage, subdisciplinary distinctions, and scarves.

Yes, scarves get their own category, as they well should.

a colleague’s facebook post about her flight from DC to Chicago for AAAs

For me, the two that most reflect what I wrote about tatuadores are fieldsite flair and the critique of consumptive practices (though I think professional balance could be a subset of this). Both are in the service of authentification, but work in different ways.

Firstly, to keep in mind the problems that arise from the ubiquitous consumptive practices of late-modern capitalism is not only about acknowledging global inequalities and all of the exploitation (of people, non-human animals, and natural resources) that is necessary to produce and sustain such a system of production and consumption (and that obviously is a very important part of it), but is also about performing as a person who is concerned about these things. Because as anthropologists, at least in this century, we are concerned with issues of social justice, to be ignorant or dismissive of these problems would mark one as uncritical, and thus something of a not so great anthropologist. Thus, to dress smartly, thoughtfully, but not entirely professionally, and certainly not in a way that overtly supports unjust productive and consumptive conditions, is to perform authentication (Bucholtz and Hall 2005:500) as an anthropologist.

The flair component of dress performs authentication of another requirement of anthropology: fieldwork. Because anthropology prides itself on use of ethnography, long-term engagement with a fieldsite, and integration into communities in which we study, to wear things that come from or reflect the places we work becomes an important performance as well. Of course at times these things remind us of those to whose kindness and help we owe our information and lifework. But they also are something of a symbol to show to others not only where we work, but it’s importance to us, and that yes, we actually spent enough time in the field to find a beautiful stone necklace, to acquire a beautifully embroidered blouse, or even to be given a tshirt promoting a local business.

And so, in the ways we dress, anthropologists often reflect the twin pillars of anthropology: theory and practice. Savage Minds quotes Carla Jones: “I suppose it is unsurprising that anthropologists are invested in what we wear at AAA, after all this is our social community. Who better than we understand that social meaning is generated through symbols?” Like the very tattoos that tatuadores wear, some symbols are important because of the social capital they connote, rather than their economic worth (use value rather than exchange value to put things in Marx’s terms).

And scarves are just important because they are awesome.

I show off fieldsite flair with my bolivian necklace, and of course, it’s paired with a scarf

And now, as a nod to perhaps my only consistent blog reader, I shall end with a question. What do you wear (at academic conferences or otherwise) that involves some sort of symbol? Is it conscious or ingrained that you do so? And what do you definitely not wear because of what it symbolizes?